Marcuse Among the Technocrats: America, Automation, and Postcapitalist Utopias, 1900-1941 J. Jesse Ramírez ABSTRACT The dominant narrative about the Frankfurt School during the 1930s and 1940s portrays the group as “permanent exiles,” their cultural, conceptual, and linguistic differences from their American hosts perhaps equally as vast as their geographical distance from Germany. This essay seeks to revise this narrative through a historically contextualized reading of Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory. Building on new histories of critical theory’s American period, as well as on Howard Brick’s recent work on the transatlantic postcapitalist vision, I show that early critical theory, Second International European Marxism, and American progressive thinkers such as Thorstein Veblen and the Technocrats shared a discourse on the utopian potential of systemic shifts in early twentieth-century capitalism. While Marcuse’s colleagues saw their post- capitalist vision of rational economic planning perversely realized in the state capitalisms of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Roosevelt’s America, Marcuse instead took inspiration from Technocracy’s left wing, especially Lewis Mumford’s vision of automatism in Technics and Civilization. By helping him imagine the possibility of full automation, of the abolition of (alien- ated) labor, and of a post-scarcity world, Left Technocracy contributed to making Marcuse one of the most remarkable utopian thinkers in modern America. I. “No Critical Theory Without America” As Herbert Marcuse lay dying in a hospital in Starnberg, Germany, he spoke English. It was a language he had barely known in the 1930s, the decade he had arrived in the United States along with the other Jewish-Marxist refugees clus- tered around the Institute for Social Research and its director, Max Horkheimer. Considering themselves champions of a European intellectual tradition that was degenerating into barbarism on the continent, and wary of what they regarded as the anti-theoretical grammar of Anglophone thought, the Horkheimer Circle did not publish their Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in English until 1941, and per- haps even then only because their European publisher had fallen to the National Socialists (cf. Jay, Exiles 40).1 As Martin Jay has phrased it, the members of the Horkheimer Circle lived out much of the 1930s and 1940s as “[p]ermanent exiles,” their cultural, conceptual, and linguistic differences from their American hosts perhaps equally as vast as their geographical distance from their homeland. In- 1 I have adopted the designation Horkheimer Circle from Thomas Wheatland and others in order to indicate that the object of my analysis will not be the ‘Frankfurt School,’ a rather amorphous term that too strongly emphasizes theoretical and political coherence among the Institute’s members. 32 J. Jesse Ramírez deed, the dominant narrative surrounding the so-called Frankfurt School during this period portrays the group as insular critics of American mass culture, forlorn over the death of radical alternatives, resigned to writing messages in a bottle (in German) to some unforeseeable future. What should we make, then, of the incon- gruent fact that, in his final hours, Marcuse “did not speak his mother tongue” (Habermas, “Thermador” 80)? What sort of homecoming was it when Marcuse died in his native land speaking an exile’s English, that all too un-Hegelian, im- mediate of idioms that, for the Horkheimer Circle, was supposedly little more than a vehicle for positivism? The title—No Critical Theory without America—of a German collection of essays on the Horkheimer Circle serves as my starting point.2 Marcuse’s use of English points to the still under-appreciated role that America played in his thought. To be sure, recent work by David Jenemann and Thomas Wheatland has begun to fill gaps in the earlier histories of the Horkheimer Circle by Martin Jay and Rolf Wiggershaus, revising common assumptions about its anti-American, mandarin aloofness. Jenemann’s Adorno in America not only demonstrates that Adorno had a much more ambivalent relationship toward American culture than has been recognized, but even more surprisingly, we learn for the first time that Adorno and Horkheimer could have ended up working in Hollywood, had their attempts in the 1940s to pitch a script for an experimental film on anti-Semitism been successful (cf. 128-47). Wheatland’s The Frankfurt School in Exile, the most precise history of critical theory’s American period to date, uncovers previously unknown institutional and personal links among the Horkheimer Circle, the New York Intellectuals, and the Marxist pragmatist Sidney Hook, among others. Yet while Jenemann and Wheatland have contributed to a more accurate record of the Horkheimer Circle’s time in exile, the full story of Marcuse in America has yet to be told. Moreover, neither in Barry Katz’s aesthetically focused intellectual biography of Marcuse, nor in Douglas Kellner’s philosophically comprehensive one, is this topic covered sufficiently. As Marcuse begins to make a long overdue return to scholarly attention, the time is ripe for a more historically contextualized account of his critical theory. Such an account would situate Marcuse not only within the German philosophical and sociological traditions—Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Heidegger, and Marcuse’s colleagues at the Institute have been the usual focal points here—but also within the discursive fields that shaped modern American intellectual life. From his first publications in English in the 1940s to his radical interventions dur- ing the 1960s and 1970s, Marcuse wrote his most significant works in American settings. We would do well to remember Peter Lind’s description of Marcuse in the 1950s: “Marcuse is now an American citizen, living in the USA, writing for American audiences and teaching American students” (178). As Marcuse’s son, Peter, sees it, by the end of World War II, following his governmental service in the Offices of War Information and of Strategic Services, Herbert was politically, culturally, and legally American (cf. 249-52). Thus, the statement that there would 2 Claussen, Negt, and Werz, eds. Keine Kritische Theorie Ohne Amerika. Unless otherwise noted in the Works Cited, translations from the German are my own. Marcuse Among the Technocrats 33 have been no critical theory without America is not sufficient in Marcuse’s case. I will argue that America was even more vital for his project, and especially for what I consider to be his most enduring legacy: Utopianism. Following Fredric Jameson’s lead, I would like to ask, regarding Marcuse, “why Utopias have flour- ished in one period and dried up in another” (xiv), that is, what are “the specific situations and circumstances under which their composition is possible, situations which encourage this peculiar vocation or talent at the same time that they offer suitable materials for its exercise” (11)? To answer these questions, we must begin by rethinking the way early critical theory has been historically framed. That the Horkheimer Circle took a decisive turn in the early 1940s has become a common thesis for historians of early criti- cal theory. Central to this thesis is a tripartite periodization of the Horkheimer Circle’s intellectual development according to the following research projects: in- terdisciplinary materialism (1930-37), the critical theory of society (1937-40), and the critique of instrumental reason (1940-45).3 Lead by Jürgen Habermas and his students, subsequent generations of critical theorists have narrated the transi- tion from the critical theory of society to the critique of instrumental reason as a pivotal ‘paradigm shift,’ one whose starting point was the acceptance of Pollock’s theory of state capitalism and whose aporetic conclusion was Dialectic of Enlight- enment. “Pollock’s theory,” writes Helmut Dubiel, “provided [the Horkheimer Circle] with the economic justification for considering an economic analysis of society no longer necessary or even possible” (81). From the 1940s onward, so the narrative goes, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse developed Pollock’s notion of the primacy of politics over economics into analyses of the totally adminis- tered, one-dimensional society, a project that forgoes empirical investigations into capitalism’s potential for immanent crisis and tends instead toward a fundamental (and according to Habermas, normatively confused) critique of Western reason. Instead of pursuing the admittedly important question of normative coherence in early critical theory, I want to recast the 1940s paradigm shift in more histori- cally contextual terms. In Transcending Capitalism, a brilliant study of twentieth- century transatlantic intellectual history, Howard Brick traces the longue durée of the postcapitalist vision, a view held by European and American intellectuals which stated that a new type of social economy was emerging alongside phenom- ena such as state intervention and the modern corporation. Brick notes further that “the postcapitalist vision possessed a good deal of political liability,” and thus spanned the political spectrum (8). The Horkheimer Circle’s thinking on state capitalism and instrumental reason must therefore be placed within the ear- ly twentieth-century postcapitalist dreamscape. Along with Second International European Marxism and American progressive social thought, the Horkheimer Circle shared a vision of the end of capitalism’s classical liberal phase, and while